In the paper, Inefficiencies in the Information Thicket: A Case Study of Derivative Disclosures During the Financial Crisis, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, I provide an empirical examination of the effect of enhanced derivative disclosures by examining the disclosure experience of the monoline insurance industry in 2008. Conventional wisdom concerning the causes of the Financial Crisis posits that insufficient disclosure concerning firms’ exposure to complex credit derivatives played a key role in creating the uncertainty that plagued the financial sector in the fall of 2008. To help avert future financial crises, regulatory proposals aimed at containing systemic risk have accordingly focused on enhanced derivative disclosures as a critical reform measure. A central challenge facing these proposals, however, has been understanding whether enhanced derivative disclosures can have any meaningful effect given the complexity of credit derivative transactions.

Like AIG Financial Products, monoline insurance companies wrote billions of dollars of credit default swaps on multi-sector CDOs tied to residential home mortgages, but unlike AIG, their unique status as financial guarantee companies subjected them to considerable disclosure obligations concerning their individual credit derivative exposures. As a result, the experience of the monoline industry during the Financial Crisis provides an ideal setting with which to test the efficacy of reforms aimed at promoting more elaborate derivative disclosures.

(more…)